YouTube Trends & Channels Scraper

This Apify Actor scrapes real-time trending data from YouTube. It extracts popular channels, rising channels, trending videos by category, and popular keywords for over 25 countries — with deep channel analytics and video velocity metrics you won't get from the official API.

Features

• Multi-Country Support: Scrape trends for World, US, UK, India, Brazil, Japan, and many more.
• Category Filtering: Get trends for All categories or specific ones like Music, Gaming, News, Sports, and more.
• Popular Channels: Top trending channels ranked by activity, with full channel stats (subscriber count, total views, average views, video count, channel description, and creation date).
• Rising Channels: A dedicated section of channels that are breaking out — identified by an outsized views-to-subscribers ratio. Each channel includes its rising_reasons (e.g., "6.3x views:subscribers") and rising_reason_types (e.g., "breakout").
• Deep Channel Intelligence: For every channel (popular or rising) you get channel_id, channel_handle, subscriber_count, video_count, view_count, avg_views, growth_percent, growth_days, and created_at.
• Video Velocity: Each trending video includes a velocity field (e.g., "246K/hr") showing how fast it is accumulating views right now.
• Rank Delta Tracking: Know if a video is climbing, falling, or holding its position with rank_delta_type ("up", "down", "same", "new") and rank_delta_value.
• YouTube Shorts Detection: Videos are flagged with is_short: true/false so you can separate Shorts from regular content.
• Exact Engagement Metrics: Raw integer counts for views, likes, and comments alongside human-readable views_formatted, likes_formatted, and comments_formatted.
• Rich Video Metadata: Each video includes video_id, thumbnail, duration, channel_id, channel_thumbnail, channel_subscriber_count, published_at (ISO timestamp), published_text (e.g. "3 days ago"), description, and language.
• Popular Keywords: The day's hottest search keywords as a flat list of strings.
• Timestamp: Every dataset item includes a scraped_at ISO UTC timestamp.

Input Parameters

The input of this scraper is a JSON object with the following fields:

Field	Type	Description	Default
country	String	The country to scrape trends for (slug format, e.g., united-kingdom).	world
category	String	Category section to focus on (e.g., music, gaming, all). All categories on the page are always scraped.	all

Supported Countries

• World
• India, Indonesia, United States, Brazil
• Saudi Arabia, France, Japan, Germany
• Thailand, United Kingdom, Turkey, Mexico
• Philippines, Spain, Vietnam, United Arab Emirates
• Russia, South Africa, Canada, Switzerland
• Australia, Chile, Netherlands, Italy, South Korea

Output

Each dataset item is a complete snapshot of trends for the selected country, including:

• country — The country scraped.
• scraped_at — ISO UTC timestamp of the scrape.
• popular_channels — Ranked list of currently trending channels with full channel analytics.
• rising_channels — Channels breaking out based on views-to-subscribers ratio, with rising reasons.
• popular_keywords — Flat list of the day's hottest search terms.
• categories_data — Dictionary keyed by category slug (e.g. "music", "gaming") with full trending video lists per category.

Sample Output (abbreviated)

{
  "country": "canada",
  "scraped_at": "2026-10-02T05:52:34.991697+00:00",
  "popular_channels": [
    {
      "rank": 1,
      "channel_id": "UCPC0L1d253x-KuMNwa05TpA",
      "channel_name": "Taylor Swift - Topic",
      "channel_handle": "@taylorswift",
      "channel_thumbnail": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/...",
      "subscriber_count": 718000,
      "video_count": 2154,
      "view_count": 10287434330,
      "avg_views": 4488372,
      "growth_percent": 0.0,
      "growth_days": 0,
      "description": "And, baby, that's show business for you...",
      "created_at": "2013-07-01T20:08:08Z",
      "rising_reasons": [],
      "rising_reason_types": [],
      "recent_videos": []
    }
  ],
  "rising_channels": [
    {
      "channel_name": "Taylor Swift - Topic",
      "subscriber_count": 718000,
      "rising_reasons": ["6.3x views:subscribers"],
      "rising_reason_types": ["breakout"],
      "recent_videos": []
    }
  ],
  "popular_keywords": ["punjabi song", "karan aujla", "saturday night", "fortnitemare"],
  "categories_data": {
    "music": {
      "name": "Music🏆 Dominated by Taylor Swift - Topic",
      "videos": [
        {
          "rank": 1,
          "rank_delta_type": "same",
          "rank_delta_value": 0,
          "video_id": "vRjaGgDsWSo",
          "title": "Casa Tupka Anthemo | @YoYoHoneySingh feat. Priyanshi | Full Video",
          "url": "https://youtube.com/watch?v=vRjaGgDsWSo",
          "thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vRjaGgDsWSo/mqdefault.jpg",
          "duration": "3:06",
          "is_short": false,
          "channel_name": "Yo Yo Honey Singh",
          "channel_id": "UC1KonH1j8WMhc5cT6Bp7NtA",
          "channel_subscriber_count": 8740000,
          "published_at": "2026-09-19T05:30:09Z",
          "published_text": "12 days ago",
          "views": 76419776,
          "likes": 1439840,
          "comments": 111219,
          "views_formatted": "76M",
          "likes_formatted": "1.4M",
          "comments_formatted": "111K",
          "velocity": "246K/hr"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

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